I'm delighted with the gentoo concept and have installed the system from stage 1. My system boots up just fine, but after doing most of the setup actions, the system gives me a prompt which is not the usual bash prompt, but rather begins with "init-". It does not know I am root; typing the 'w' command gives a warning about needing to mount /proc.

The last console message before the 'init' prompt occurs is
"VFS mounted root (ext3) readonly"

Reading the man page for mount, I believe the problem is that mount fails to mount /proc (despite it being listed in my /etc/fstab) because it cannot write to the file /etc/mtab, because /etc lives in the root partition (/) and has apparently been mounted readonly. So init stops, and does not get the rest of the way to giving me a login prompt.

In my /etc/fstab, I do not ask for / to be mounted readonly; in fact it uses default options and is of type ext2, so I'm not sure why VFS is taking it over and mounting it as a read-only ext3.

Any suggestions on what to change?
Thanks very much!
- Phil

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By the way, on a seperate matter, in the installation manual, code listing 17, where you do the chroot command, you might want to mention that if you are installing from within another linux distribution, rather than from the boot CD, that you need to use something like

(as discussed in the Linux From Scratch book), since otherwise the environment variables set in your existing linux distribution (Mandrake 8.0 for me) may mess up the bootstrap script.
It took me several hours to figure out that this was why bootstrap was crashing.

Could you share your /etc/fstab with us, and also, what arguments to you pass to you kernel? I tell my kernel to mount my filesystem as readonly and let my init scripts remount it read/write._________________- Kyle Manna

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink). Adding the following
# line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will use almost no
# memory if not populated with files)

By the way, as I sent you my /etc/lilo.conf file I realized from its last line that that is where the root file system gets mounted read only, so I changed it to read-write. However, I still get essentially the same problem as before. The VFS message to the console now just says it mounted root, without the 'read-only', but I still then get a

Code:

init-2.05a#

prompt, rather than a login, and it still has not mounted /proc, although now it does so without complaining when I tell it to, since now it can write to /etc/mtab. So, it appears that the read-only nature of the root partition was not the issue -- something else is causing init to stop early.

Output from dmsg and from mount -l follows below. First, though, let me mention that after reading the other threads you cited, I tried the 'emerge baselayout' command, but although that ran ok, I still seem to lack an 'init' binary (there is no init in /sbin).

So, probably that lack of an 'init' is the problem. Since the emerge baselayout didn't create 'init', I may go back to the beginning and completely reinstall - since I too had problems with g++ not being built, and with the timezone area not being created. In fact, I may have to try booting from the CD, instead of doing it all from within my Mandrake system, though I'm not sure what else could be making a difference.

Is there some way for portage to warn you that a sub-task failed (such as setting up the time zone part, within glibc)? That would give a hint that something else might go wrong later.

My fix to get g++ installed was to edit /usr/portage/sys-devel/gcc/gcc-2.95.3-r5.ebuild,
to add 'c++' to the languages list (currently it only listed 'c', so it did not build g++, only gcc, but later on that causes problems as some of the packages need g++)

Also, maybe I'll look at the portage developer docs and try to understand better what portage is actually doing.

Please let me know if you have any other suggestions.
Thanks
- Phil
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output from mount -l:

Maybe you have a journal on your filesystem? Was this partition ext3 at one point? I'd say you are best off just re-installing gentoo, or at least re-extracting the build tarball._________________- Kyle Manna

yes, there is a journal on it, I had tried setting it up as ext3, but went back to ext2 for some reason, I think because my mandrake system did not support ext3. I thought everything would just continue to accept it as ext2. I'll try re-creating the partition as ext2 and re-installing.

Thanks for rapid turnaround of the suggestions -- it must be very hard trying to guess all the possible ways someone else's system might differ from what you expect!
- Phil

The earlier trouble was thus probably caused either by
-- using LILO instead of GRUB, or
-- incorrectly compiling glibc (as evidenced by it not creating the timezones), either because of environment variables from my Mandrake installation messing up the chroot environment, or because of the g++ compiler not being built (which itself may have been due to the environment issue)

Anyway, it works now and I'm very pleased.
Thanks for all your help.
- Phil